John Phillips: Four Decades of Friendship and One Traumatized Bus Driver

Bill Adam pulled to the berm and instructed, Drop your pants and climb in the trunk.

July 2010 By JOHN PHILLIPS

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When I was 19, I deployed a 1963 Ford Ranch Wagon to tow my race car to Mosport. I arrived late and slept in the wagon’s cargo bay, between tires, tools, and a leaky floor jack. I awoke at dawn and slid under the vehicle to examine a U-joint that had been sounding like lug nuts rolling around inside a Folgers can.

I was beneath the Ford for quite a spell, eventually dozing off, and awoke to find a handsome blond-haired gent peering at me with concern, possibly horror. “You okay?” he asked. “I’ve parked my race car [a Corvette Grand Sport] next to yours. For the last hour or so, I’ve been trying not to step on your legs.”

I crawled out, smacking my forehead in the process. “Asleep,” I told him, meaning I’d merely taken a nap. He thought I’d slept there all night

“Holy crap,” he said. “I don’t think you should do that. I’ve got friends with hotel rooms. Did you know your head is bleeding?” His name was Bill Adam, and he lived in ­Burlington, Ontario.

During that weekend’s race, he lapped me, maybe twice, and won. Afterward, we talked. He’d been watching the lines I was taking and, after satisfying himself that I wasn’t legally blind, gave me valuable advice, including this: “You really need a shower.” For the rest of that year’s races, Bill and I parked our cars side by side. We’ve been fast friends for 38 years.

Well, Bill was fast. I was not. So I quit driving and started helping him whenever I could. In 1973, he won the A-Production national championship in a big-block Corvette. The next year, at a NASCAR race at Mosport, he qualified third, behind Bobby Allison and Richard Petty. Petty crashed on the first lap, later telling Bill, “Well, hell, I looked good on the pace lap, didn’t I?”

In 1977, Bill bought a three-year-old John Greenwood–built Corvette. “I offered him $15,000, thinking he’d show me the door,” Bill recalls. “When he said, ‘Okay,’ I about fell out of my seat.” With that car, he won a Trans-Am race at St. Jovite, defeating Bob Tullius and the well-funded Group 44.

“After which,” Bill remembers, “Tullius walked up and said, ‘Son, I don’t know how you’re doing this, in that old car. You cheating?’ I said, ‘Sir, I wish I were, but I don’t know how.’ ”

Tullius hired Bill to drive one of his Triumph TR8s. In their first outing, in 1980, the two paired to win the GT class at the 12 Hours of Sebring, then went on to win a slew of Trans-Am races.

By ’83, Bill and Tullius were in Jaguar IMSA GTP cars, winning at Road Atlanta—Jaguar’s first GTP victory—at Lime Rock, and again at Mosport. Bill’s career flourished, including multiple seasons in the Rothmans Porsche Cup, where he often drove around Scott Goodyear, Richard Spenard, and Ron Fellows. And then he met Champion Porsche’s president Dave Maraj, who asked Bill to drive a 911 Turbo at Sebring. “I asked, ‘Well, who’d be my co-driver?’ ” Bill recalls. “And Dave replied, ‘Well, it’s a guy with a funny name. Hans Stuck. Heard of him?’ ” In ’96, Bill and Stuck won, of course. It was Bill’s second GT-class Sebring victory.

During the decades that Bill and I have attended races, we’ve shared countless immature adventures, many concluding with a police interview but never an actual arrest.

On one interstate slog from Toronto to Elkhart Lake, Bill and I—in my 1978 Ford Fairmont—spent multiple hours amusing the guys driving the truck towing Bill’s Corvette. First, we’d tuck in behind the trailer and switch driving positions on the fly, passing the truck at 60-second intervals. That got boring. So, at a rest stop, Bill rooted around inside the trailer, locating 10 feet of rope and a four-foot-long stick. Bill urged the race rig to depart ahead of us, then he tied the rope to the spokes of my Fairmont’s steering wheel—running both cords under the driver’s seat—and handed me the stick. This lash-up allowed Bill to steer from the back seat while I operated the throttle from the passenger seat. In that fashion, we lit out and passed the tow truck—this time, evidently, with no one driving, a kind of Flying Dutchman of the Wisconsin Dells.

Still not satisfied, Bill pulled to the berm and instructed, “Drop your pants and climb in the trunk. When I drive past the truck, you pop up and moon everyone.” This sounded perfectly reasonable. In the darkness of the trunk, I could hear Bill’s muffled voice. “We’re getting closer,” he shouted. “Almost there.” And, sure enough, I could hear the roar of tires and a diesel engine. When Bill shouted, “Now!” I performed a flawless jack-in-the-box, hanging out my lily-white bare cheeks at 60 mph. It seemed the perfect prank until I turned around to enjoy the look on my colleagues’ faces. What I observed instead was the terrifying proximity of a Greyhound bus’s grille and a Ralph Kramden driver who definitely wasn’t smiling.

On April 17, Bill Adam, 64, was deservedly inducted into the Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame in Toronto. I felt like a proud parent. But somewhere out there is a former bus driver who’s still in psychoanalysis. And it’s not my fault.